With Texas specifically, I had to continue tweaking, and tweaking, and tweaking...and tweaking my formulas to get something that looked believable for most of rural Texas. In most states, a rather uniform formula could be used; where there are Latinos, it doesn't work. With TX in particular, it was even worse. I had to create a whole range of scenarios to balance out everything.

In the northern part of the state, I kept running into issues with white support for Obama being negative - even when bumping down Latino turnout and support for Obama to ungodly levels even by Latino standards. There are still counties on the map where white Obama support is at like 1-2% after all of that, including bumping Latino support for Romney up to 60-70% in some cases.

In South Texas, it was the opposite. White support for Obama kept producing ungodly levels of support that were showing up as majorities in some counties. It doesn't help that white population in some of these counties is so small that moving Latino support by 5-10 points shifted Obama's white support by 50 points. I continued to increase Latino turnout and (mostly) support to levels comparable to black voters in order to get something halfway realistic. Even then, the share of white support on the map still sticks out compared to the rest of the state, lingering between 25-30%.

(It's worth noting that this broader trend - whites seeming to be more in favor of Obama in the more heavily minority rural counties than in neighboring rural counties with smaller minority populations - was something I ran into to varying degrees quite consistently throughout the country, including in heavily Black and Latino areas, the former of which is much easier to project in terms of turnout/support)

Anyway...I'm wondering if there might have been some truth/accuracy to my initial projections for the map, in that whites were actually unusually Democratic in these heavily Latino counties and that - when combined with drop-offs (potentially? haven't looked yet) in Latino turnout in these areas - a huge swing among the otherwise small white vote to Trump there was enough to swing the Rio Grande overall to Trump, even though Latinos may have been more Democratic this time around and/or turned out in larger numbers? It's worth noting again though that in many of these Rio Grande counties, I had Obama at 90% among Latinos...so I'm not sure how they could have gotten much more Democratic there than they were in 2012.

And maybe that's why there's a swing to Trump there: they didn't, but the whites swung to Trump by a very large amount and Latino turnout (at least in raw numbers) was either down or there wasn't enough of an increase to cancel out white swing. I do have a hard time believing Trump improved among Latinos overall, whether in TX or nationally.

I wonder whether this is more driven by issues with Census and registration data than anything real. It reminds me of the famous puzzle about unusually low Hispanic mortality in the US, which very likely is driven largely by death certificates that fail to acknowledge the decedent's ethnicity.

So why is that CNN is in a tizzy over this but when the SPLC eggs on some side to try and shoot Tony Perkins they get to have Morris Dees on as an "expert?"

Because the msm conveniently forgets that the southern POVERTY law center has a secret cayman islands bank account to hide their profits from selling hatred, fear, and lies for decades. Alex jones is an easy target because he openly shills for water filters and fake antibiotics.

I think the real "war on legal marijuana" is likely to take the form of a future that is so terrifying, so insecure, and so full of anxiety that no one can enjoy a smoke even if it's legal to have one. Best to stick with alcohol, opioids, and tranqs over the next few years, I think.

Opioids should be avoided like the plague.

Yeah. The suggestion otherwise isn't funny.

No one is going to become a dope fiend because they misunderstood my attempt to make a dark joke on the Atlas forum and decided to try heroin or something. But let's see how many people are poisoning themselves after a couple of years living under the policies of Sanchez's beloved Dear Leader. Let's see how many people are addicted to opioids after Attorney General Sessions cracks down on legal marijuana and they have nothing else available to help them cope with their pain. Let's see how many people are dying from overdoses when rural critical access hospitals are closing by the dozens because many of their patients are uninsured and the state and federal subsidies that they rely on to meet their operating expenses have disappeared. Let's see how many more funerals all of us get to attend when federal funding for local government agencies and non-profits dries up and millions of people lose access to treatment for addiction treatment and preventive healthcare.

Of course the Obama administration's complacent response to tens of thousands of opioid deaths has been a scandal on the level of the Reagan administration's treatment of the AIDS epidemic – a scandal that has gone essentially unacknowledged by the national media, I should add - so maybe I shouldn't blame anyone too much for refusing to vote for the candidate who campaigned on four more years of those awful policies. I am fully aware of these bleak realities, and gallows humor is the only response that I have to them at this point. I don't need to be chided for indulging in it.

The political geography board is essentially dead and mostly devoted to an extremely in-depth and limited-interest discussion of one retiree's attempts to redistrict a small city in the Northeastern US, so I think that Sentinel is much better off posting this here. I would not have seen it for months if it had been left in the topology ghetto.

Sentinel: I recommend getting a student copy of Tableau. You can get a one year license if you have a school email address. It's not quite as easy as using a ready-to-go application like the Redraw the States tool, but if you want to quickly create custom county or zip code-level maps and calculate results and demographics for new areas it's probably one of the easiest options. (And it is also a widely used data visualization tool with many other potential applications.)

They have become more liberal on social issues and more conservative on fiscal issues. I used to be more for a populist message on the economy... lift everyone up type of thing. Now as a natural reaction to the ilk that Trump has brought out I have a much more hard line stance on fiscal issues. Cut taxes, cut social programs, support as much free trade as possible, stop sending money directly from the two coasts to support social programs in the Midwest and South (we pay way more in taxes than we get back). Basically, I want a sink or swim economy. But I want it to be "fair" on social policies, which means there shouldn't be racial discrimination, gays should have equal treatment, and we shouldn't waste a ton of money on dumb wars. So on balance, I still support democrats.

That being said, I see the appeal of cutting off all of the support that flows from the coasts to the heartland, if only to show these folks how much they rely on the elites that they decry so much. If some temporary tough love is what it takes to show them that they should be voting for Democrats, well... so be it.

Yeah, the f-word is before each 'you'. I'm pretty sure the posters in question have enough experience with the profanity filter to be able to tell.

There are enough ways to say f**k without setting off the filter that it never occured to me that someone who knew of its existence would type the four letters knowing they would get erased and creating the bland " you, buddy." instead of the more impactful "F**k you, buddy".

I wanted the cheap satisfaction of typing the word and hitting 'post' without spending time editing.

You really think it's good that the country has legions and legions of economically struggling people who think the root cause of their problems is immigrants and big government, so vote for candidates who would literally take away the only support they're actually getting? How do you propose these people be swayed to vote in their own interest? The evidence, logic, and facts that we would want to use would be seen as untrustworthy elitist hogwash. The only language they know is "feeling" like something is true. It makes things incredibly difficult.

At the point when you are literally proposing liquidating large parts of the population because of their untenable political views, you need to take some time to reflect seriously on what kind of person you want to be.

I voted more "conservative," but I mean that in terms of skepticism of, and perhaps at this point outright opposition to liberal capitalism, insofar as that means anything. In some ways this is the diametric opposite of Hagrid's answer, although I don't want anyone to think that I have any sympathy with the cruder, highly prejudiced critiques of "cosmopolitanism" or "identity politics" that have been floating around for years but that have been especially discussed since this election.

Oh, and more Democratic, less Republican - there is not a Republican in the entire country for whom I would vote at this point, and the less said about our ridiculous “third parties,” the better – although I dislike all of our parties more than I did one year ago.

Of course it goes without saying that I am more opposed to the Republican Party, the so-called conservative movement, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump than ever before. How ironic that we are supposed to believe that we need to "build a wall" to protect ourselves when the real barbarians are already inside our gates and will shortly assume control of our entire federal government.

There is strong evidence that Mississippi's swing is largely the result of voter suppression measures: No other state saw anything close to the drop in turnout that occurred in Mississippi, turnout declined most in majority-black counties (15% in some that I've looked at - despite relatively small swings in the actual margin), and every attempt to model the election's results that I have seen shows Clinton's vote share under-performing dramatically in the state relative to what demographics and other conditions predict.

I suspect that it would be telling to compare turnout percentages and changes in turnout in Mississippi's majority black counties to majority-black counties in neighboring states.

At some point last year this forum crossed the line from "charmingly vintage" to infuriating. I'm sure that I'm not the only person who spends less time here as a result of this. I think it's particularly frustrating that nothing has changed even many months after Dave Leip promised that he would look into making changes based on some critical feedback he had received from members of the site.

The data side of the site is better, but it falls well short of where I believe it should be given how important and unique a resource this site has become. I had been considering upgrading to a lifetime membership, but given the trajectory of the site I'm not even sure that I'll renew this year until/unless the site moves beyond its current state of semi-neglect.

Looks like Hillary can do what Mondale couldn't; be the first Democrat to lose Minnesota since 1972.

LOL

CHA-CHING!

There's hardly cause for petty gloating. Clinton won a state that was assumed safe by less than 2% and with only 46.5% of the vote. It was the worst performance of any Democratic presidential candidate in Minnesota in the absence of either a significant independent candidate or a landslide Republican victory since WWII. In retrospect, we all should have been terrified by this prediction, not laughing at it.

I haven't experienced anything directed at me, but I'm not exactly the kind of person whose likely to attract the attention of xenophobes or misogynists. I know plenty of people who have, but I'm also aware enough to know that sexist and xenophobic harassment were routine in the United States even before November 9th, 2016.

("Racist" and "homophobic" are terms that are often thrown into the mix, but DJT hasn't embraced the rhetoric of homophobia or racism - Fuzzy Bear's contrast with George Wallace is correct and telling IMO. Trump hasn't embraced racist ideology, either. He supports policies that would cause disproportionate harm to minorities, but that is not the same thing, even if sanctimonious liberals will try to tell you that it is in their ill-advised attempts to shame people into agreeing with them.)

That said, I really despise anyone who wants to shrug off that these things happen and dismiss them as unimportant. And Trump's victory has clearly signaled to some people that these things are OK and that most Ameticans will accept them. I just want to be clear that Donald Trump is a product of our national ugliness and collective neuroses more than the other way around.

Anyway I think that immigrants have good reasons to feel especially threatened now, and good people ought to do what they can to help. If you care about living in a country where we treat women as equals - all women, not just the pretty, rich, non-threatening ones - then you also have good reasons to be disturbed and worried about President Donald Trump. He clearly has a very tolerant attitude toward sexual assault, and that alone should have disqualified him. People like Reince Priebus, Paul Ryan, and Mike Huckabee belong in hell for being hypocritical enablers of this filth.

I have also heard a lot of nasty comments about certain groups of people coming from my "tolerant" liberal friends who seem to have no idea that, yes, the blue-collar types whom you are perpetually belittling, ridiculing, and caricaturing really might have good reasons to despise and fear people like you. Not immigrants, but educated professionals, in particular those in managerial, legal, or finance-related professions. Tolerant liberals who talk about poor white people and poor rural people (making no exception for rural minorities, mostly out of ignorance I assume) in terms and crude generalizations that would (rightly) provoke harsh condemnation if they were applied to many other groups.

Elsewhere, though it could have been avoided had President Obama kept Howard Dean on as DNC chair.

This I don't agree with: Democrats under Dean were able to work frustration with the raging incompetence and amorality of the Bush administration into political victories, but there wasn't really an underlying program. When Bush was out of office, the coalition was left with little ability to hold its votes together.

I think it's easy to miss this because of how rapidly the recession rearranged the electorate's priorities, but it didn't change the underlying reality - this shift was inevitable.

Dean could not have done worse than his successors, but I don't know how he could have done all that much better.

Voted for the first four, by the way, along with passing a politically unsustainable healthcare bill. #2 is most important and borderline unforgivable, though. The collapse of Democratic parties at the state and local level is a disgrace, and singlehandedly enough to make me wish that HRC had taken the nomination in '08.

(e: Frodo's point about regional distinctions is well taken, although few of the counties that we are talking about are the white, rural/small city, Southern cases where the Democratic Party was in an inevitable and terminal decline for decades.)

Yes, I'm saying it: Hillary Clinton was the right president for 2008-2016 and she would have done a better job than Barack Obama. She would not have embodied the same virtues, but in retrospect Obama's virtues were not worth tolerating his weaknesses.

I think he winds up looking more like J.Q. Adams than JFK or any other more complimentary comparison that you were likely to hear about in 2008. Or, less charitably and more pessimistically, James Buchanan.

He's a talented and accomplished politician who ran a relatively clean and competent administration. He may even have a claim to being one of the great moral leaders of our era. But the politics of 2008 - his politics - have aged horribly. He already seems like someone out of a different time.

He utterly failed to build on the movement that got him elected, and he presided over the total disintegration of his party. Any president who leaves office yielding total control of the federal government to the opposing party has explaining to do. And any president who yields office to a figure like Donald Trump cannot be rated highly.

His domestic policy accomplishments are likely to be rolled back completely. Including much of the Affordable Care Act - don't believe the experts who proclaim it impossible. Even much of the New Deal and Great Society may be in jeopardy. On foreign policy, there are successes: The capture of Bin Laden, reconciliation with Cuba, some normalization of relations with Iran. But these too might prove fleeting and unimportant in retrospect. Certainly the "pivot" to Asia has been a bust. Avoiding catastrophe is not a meaningful accomplishment when your successor is a mentally unstable entertainer with a fragile ego and no relevant experience.

I have a positive opinion of Barack Obama, but, insofar as the term is useful, this election makes him an unambiguous "failed president." And Democrats will need to come to terms with this, sooner or later.

Ron Paul is preferable to Donald Trump in almost every way. His cult of personality attracts plenty of strange people, but he's not a kleptocratic would-be strongman and he takes political institutions seriously.

Too many Democrats still fail to recognize that Donald a Trump is the worst, most destructive candidate whom he Republicans could have chosen. Even someone as extreme as Ted Cruz would do less lasting damage to this country. The most damning thing about most of the party's leaders is how little they did to stop Trump. Now we know just his little we can trust them. Never before in modern political history has the leadership of a major party so thoroughly exposed themselves as so wholly unconcerned with any interests or values other than the naked pursuit of power, whatever that costs them.

By the way, the guy (Ron Paul) must be apoplectic about how many of his supporters went over to Trump - and early and enthusiastically at that. So much for the "Liberty movement" or w/e.

What a depressing election this must have been for the more principled Paulites - it's been a long time since we've seen a presidential contest in which both major candidates were so poor at concealing their hopes to use the presidency as a vehicle for adding to their already massive personal fortunes. I doubt that Clinton would be openly leaning on world leaders to allow her to open hotels with her name on them in their countries, though.

We need a party that meets the very low bar of standing for human decency, civil society, and a clear understanding of right and wrong. The Republicab freak show certainly doesn't - it's essentially the opposite, but Democrats aren't really there either. But someone needs to offer the United States a better option than barbarism and degeneration into social Darwinism.

No one has a program to win back the Rust Belt. No one has a viable program for winning back farm counties or deindustrializing small cities. I don't want Democrats to give up on these states. I don't want our politics to give up on these places. But, speaking realistically, what can they do? Wait for catastrophic effects of climate change to revive cities like Cleveland and Detroit as they swell with refugees from the Sun Belt? Maybe by 2040, but that's a long way off.

Jesus... I don't like the idea of nominating someone in his or her late seventies either, but I need to save that list of elected officials in their late forties to sixties for reference whenever I want to trigger my gag reflex. Good grief. With a couple of exceptions, it's a horror show. And that goes for both sides. It's like an entire generation of politicians were swallowed by the equivalent of a black hole and replaced by a crew of the most insipid and mediocre public figures ever to walk the earth.

I don't expect Democrats to flip many seats between Upstate New York and the Upper Midwest. There are a few potential sunbelt gains, but it's difficult to imagine Democrats netting more than 15 seats even in the midst of a national wave. Which wave, by the way, I don't expect to happen.

We might see a wave in certain parts of the country, but this will be restricted to places where Democrats are already winning: the West Coast, the Acela corridor, other major metros, the urban cores of smaller metro areas, the most affluent and well-educated suburbs, college towns, and minority-dominated rural areas like Indian reservations, the Mississippi Delta, the Black Belt, etc.

The Rust Belt is probably as lost to Democrats as Appalachia or white parts of the Old South, and Republicans can add a large advantage in the EV relative to the PV in addition to their natural advantage in terms of winning Senate seats and House districts.

Good news. Parties should be democratic, but they should also be free to run their own primaries and restrict nominations and other decisions to party members (and by that I mean not just voters who "register" with a party when they register to vote, but people who actually join an organization).

I doubt that she'll outdo her husband or Tony Blair, but we already know what HRC does when she's not holding or openly campaigning for office.

The saddest part is that her worst opponents on the right will point to what she's doing and say, look, we were right about her. Most of them will be obvious and obnoxious hypocrites, but they won't be entirely wrong.

It'll be interesting to see what kind of attitude the Democratic Party takes toward her and her husband over the next several years, depending on how much and how quickly their grip on the party's upper echelons fades.

It will be severe, it will last for years, the new administration will be at fault, and the public opinion will blame Obama.

The public virtually always blames the administration in charge. The Republicans can blame him all they want, but it won't work.

"Evil counsel" is one of the oldest tricks in the book for tyrants and demagogues, and it has frequently worked. Donald Trump is effective at this, he has plenty of effective propagandists working on his behalf, and his followers - along with what's left of those who attempt to play the role of the "objective" and "pragmatic" center - are already firmly detached from reality. I don't see many reasons for optimism.